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Comment by alexambarch | Hacker News Reader

If you want to pick up a new language purely for fun, I wholeheartedly recommend toki pona[1]. Its small vocabulary (<200 words) and simple grammar force you to break down complex thoughts into simple ideas. This feels limiting at first, but because there isn't a prescribed way to express certain ideas, it can provide an interesting look at how you see the world compared to others.

As a quick example, there is no word for "child" in toki pona, many speakers say "jan lili" (small person), while others choose to say "jan sin" (new person).

It's shockingly easy to learn and one can become pretty proficient in very little time. There's a great community to learn from on Discord[2], along with plenty of great online resources like /dev/urandom's toki pona page[3].

[1]: https://tokipona.org [2]: https://discord.gg/nbgXCC6 [3]: https://devurandom.xyz/tokipona/

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I don't like toki pona. if you're going to have 200 words, why make them long or random? hell, you could have a consonant and a vowel or 2 and you'd have have all of your words and now they could easily be composable together. votgil[1] is basically this but with a single vowel, I haven't dived too deep but it gets close to what it should be. There's also the fact that if you're going to go the toki pona way, you need to go even deeper into the fundamentals of life in order to achieve the right composability. (Think math but for objects). Blyss symbolics also seems to be a better option. Nevertheless it was fun to learn toki pona. and I probably would not have heard of interlingua,blyss, votgil, lojban without it.

[1] http://www.ostracodfiles.com/votgil/main.html

A language should be complicated but only complicate enough to convey the concept in mind.

A 200 word limit will render a language too shallow to even discuss the concept of shallow.

Assertion: no proof. [soz, lol etc]

Yes, I guess (never heard about toki pona before) you would have to rethink how to communicate. Maybe shallow could be presented as "lukin ala" (nothing to examine), "taso sele" (only a surface) or "kote muli" (hearing something dead)

I am more surprised that you would spend one of your 137 words on "sex, to have sexual relations" as almost every language has countless ways of referring to sex without using the word itself

Interesting, I thought of something more of like incompleteness, something like sona wile pini.

It also went ahead and put non binary... which is like, right there "non" and "bi" and "nary" (which could be sex).

> It also went ahead and put non binary... which is like, right there

I think the general idea of adding a word for non-binary was that there were already words for man and woman, but if you didn't identify with either of those, you'd have to come up with your own phrase as opposed to other people who got their own dedicated word. A surprisingly high number of non-binary people speak toki pona (or at least that's my impression from the Discord server), so I think it made sense to add.

I don't think you need man/woman in a language like toki pona either, it's supposed to be this deep philosophical language. If you want to talk philosophy, reproduction is the least of your problems. There's plenty of ways to indicate the sex as well. so long as you have the word for animal/organism, you can say animal + hole/stick, who nurses for the young, hunter, whatever. Its even better because its not exact. the more exact you get, the more words you'll need.

Shallow indicates incompleteness, it lacks a whole, it does not achieve fullness. "wile pini sona" maybe? my toki pona is beyond rusty, I've forgotten all of it.

I think it should be possible but few have attempted to do so. even in programming languages, the goal is to overflow not underflow. Forth-ian languages seem to be the only ones that try to build down not up.

And doing so is difficult because it would require simplification, and simplification is difficult when you lack completeness. English itself is infinite and symbolic. A new concept was identified? lets just make up a word/symbol for it. It does not matter if it breaks structure/grammar.

> why make them long or random?

To decrease their similarity, make it more difficult to confuse/conflate one word with another.

But then use the theory of Shannon and Hamming distance to make the words as different as they can be

Word cadence is also important. We tend to add length to short words and shorten long words naturally until we reach a certain cadence. Longer words can sometimes be easier to say than short ones. If you look at tongue twisters they tend to use short, similar words. By making every word short, you could make an entire language of tongue twisters!

Edit: Also I think Toki Pona uses a reduced character set

https://jansa-tp.github.io/tpcheatsheet/Toki%20Pona%20Cheat%...

Toki Pona definitely has fewer phonemes than English (which IIRC has an above-average number of phonemes compared to other natural languages). Having fewer phonemes is important for a language like Toki Pona because it makes pronunciation much more forgiving.

> Vötgil may also be written using the non-roman alphabet. Every character is a column of 3 cells. Each cell may be white, light gray, dark gray, or black.

Weird and delightful.

Except when drawn by hand with a pencil or pen ... seems like it would inspire a squinty guess-a-rune swearfest.

Is are these triple dots of grayscale unique to Vötgil? Inspired by another alphabet?

I like the idea of a limited vocabulary and word building from there, but I think TP is way too extreme. Randall Munroe wrote a book called "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words". In the back of the book, he lists the 1000 words he used to write it. Something like that would be suitable IMHO.

But a child is neither a small person nor a new person...

Child is used in many contexts, and not all of them are covered by "small person" or "new person", true. But I think the point is that you can come up with a precise alternative term for"child" in most contexts.

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